Imagine If You Assembled The Avengers: Volume 2

Taken (Rogers/Banner x reader)

"Steve?"

"(Y/N)," he began, but the sound of your name leaving his lips was foreign to him, and the feeling of it rolling from his tongue only brought him more pain, leaving him to fall to his knees in front of you. When you reached out to him, he pushed your hands away, ashamed of himself and his inability; ashamed to be in front of you now with nothing to offer but his failure.

"I'm sorry."

"No," you could barely utter through a whisper, taking a step back, "Steve..."

"I wasn't fast enough."

Your mind heard the audible gasp from Bruce as he stood behind you, but it didn't process that anyone was there beyond you and Steve. Even as you looked at the man in front of you, it was as if he weren't real, and the moment that you were caught living in was a cruel nightmare that you couldn't wake yourself from. "Why didn't you take me with you?" you whispered harshly through clenched teeth, the anger building in your tone. "How dare you just leave me here? Without saying anything? Without letting me know that you were okay? Without letting me be there too."

"I don't know."

"Do better."

"I can't."

His curt words did nothing but incite further rage, eliciting a deep growl from your throat that exploded forth, pushing you forward to slam your hands against him in a burst of every feeling that you had held in for so many months. His body barely jolted from your strength, despite allowing it and welcoming your strike against him; his hands came up not to block himself, but to accept you, and when he caught you to pull you in, you fought back with punches and slaps that he believed he deserved.

"No, Steve! You can't just hold onto me and think I'll comfort you like I always do. I can't do that anymore," you pushed back.

He didn't fight you at all, and if anything, the lack of response only fueled you further. The soldier was allowing himself to fall, and he didn't care. He didn't want to be that person anymore; he didn't want anything anymore. Steve Rogers was a shell of a man, waiting for you to finally crush him into the nothingness that he felt.

"I want you to leave," you muttered, stepping back until you felt Bruce's hands taking hold of your arms to stop you. "You should never have come back if you didn't have her."

"(Y/N)," Bruce interrupted, "you're in shock. Let's just go sit down somewhere, okay?"

"No, she's right," Steve added, pushing up onto his feet wearily, "I should've stayed away."

"You go sit over there," Bruce scolded, pointing the Captain to a nearby couch, "and don't move until I come back. Understand?"

With barely a nod, Steve sat quietly, staring at the floor in front of him and completely still. He watched you walk away from him with the doctor, and the bottomless pit in his heart somehow only deepened with the distance between you. He wanted nothing more than to chase you and pull you to him so that he could feel something...anything that would bring him back to himself, but now he realized that you were no longer the person to do that for him. He realized that once again, making decisions on his own was where his greatest failures came, and no matter how much he regretted it, and no matter how much he wished that this had gone another way, the two of you would never be the same.

"Can you wait upstairs for me?" Bruce asked you softly, his eyes searching your expression for something that would satisfy his worry. "Give me five minutes with him, please?"

When all you could do was nod and turn to leave, he watched until you were well out of sight, not realizing that he was holding his breath until it finally burst forth in a gasp that shook with his own emotions. He had been witness to the worst news that you could have received, being brought to you by a husband who was broken and estranged, and he was completely helpless to both of you. Somehow now, he found himself as the only one in the tower with you; he found himself at a loss with what to do about the destroyed man waiting for him or with what he would say to you when he came back. Bruce found himself at a complete loss about everything.